Tyler Volk

On his book Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be

Cover Interview of July 11, 2017

In a nutshell

Quarks to Culture involves a new, big picture perspective
of the universe. Now, by universe I do not mean the astronomical cosmos that
the word usually refers to. I mean our lived universe. This includes living
cells. It includes the works of all cultures. We might call this expanded
universe the universe of all things.

What kind of new perspective? If we go down in scale into
the human body and look at the kinds of systems we know about, it is like going
back in time. Our bodily cells as living cells, as members of a type of system,
came into existence well before bodies, such as we animals who are made of
trillions of cells. Taking this time machine further downward in scale, we find
the kind of thing known as molecules in this universe of all things. Molecules
as a kind of fundamental thing came into existence, indeed, had to come into
existence, before living cells.

So, in the questions I asked that led to this work, I wanted
to find out if I could discover fundamental levels of kinds of things. I wanted
to discern these levels with a consistent logic. I return here to the time
machine just noted as one goes back downward inward in scale. Might one start
with the simplest entities known to science and build up in a logical sequence
from small and simple to large and complex? The logic involves a recurring
pattern in time, in which prior existing things combined and integrated into
larger things. At each level of larger things, the pattern or process repeated:
those larger things now became the prior existing smaller things that combined
and integrated into the next level of larger things.

There is more. Each level contains things that are
fundamentally new, because innovations in the relations of the things at each
level were necessary to create the things at the next level, at least in our
universe of things. This remarkable and special sequence I call the grand
sequence.

I have written the book so that readers are walked through
the essential, best currently known science and scholarship of the things at
each level, the innovative relations, and how those new things and relations
led to each subsequent level. That walk takes place in part two of the book,
following the general theory of the logic and the quest put forth in part one.
Finally, in part three comes what I see as a very exciting part of the book. In
part three I treat the levels as a set of phenomena in an attempt at a
universal field of scholarship and ask about commonalities or groupings of
families within the levels. I will say a bit more about this below.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011